


parting the looking glass

by mortalitasi



Series: into the forest [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Angst, Death, F/M, Romance, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2019-01-06 08:36:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12207660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: A horrible night. Tamlen and Lyna meet again, one last time.[companion piece to "We All Fall Down."]





	parting the looking glass

He doesn’t join the attack on the camp.  
  
The moments of clarity are getting fewer, farther and farther from each other—scattering from him like dust in the wind. He’s left behind to helplessly grasp at his past as it dissolves into the Song; it eats everything light and good, twisting even the basest of compulsions to its will. It is a tumor in his mind, growing bulbous and bloated, pushing everything he’s ever known to the edges of consciousness, until the entire space there that once was his is strained with its hideous girth, suffocating him, leaving only _Him_.  
  
Even now, when the music is somewhat distant, His presence lingers, bearing down like a horrific shadow. _Bring them to me_. _Eat. Tear. Spread my blessing_. Sleep would be impossible, if it were something he needed any longer—He reigns triumphant there, the span of His wings swallowing the skies of the Fade, His fire ripping through stone and will and imagination. There is nowhere to hide; the Song carries His eyes, and they never shut. A nightmare needs no rest.  
  
He cannot remember crawling into this tent, though he must have done it just some minutes past.  
  
Time began to lose meaning early on; the days and nights blur together in one endless, dissonant symphony. The far-off islands of the life he led before are disappearing on the horizon of this new existence, eaten by the black sea. He curls up on the pelts strewn across the ground, clutching at the bedroll he finds there. It smells familiar, sweet and sharp and green, and it makes him ache, though he doesn’t know why. He pushes his face into the fabric, trying to relieve the stinging his eyes are caused by the shine of the campfire that's being diffused by the canvas of the tent.  
  
That is how she finds him: coiled around her things, tucked away from the finished conflict like a terrified beast, the scraps of what used to be leather armor clinging to his arms and legs. Her hand tightens its grip on the hilt of her dar’missan, the only one she had time to grab before she was launched out of sleep—and the sound shatters the quiet. His head snaps up at her, lips pulled back in a snarl, fangs catching on his skin, and the sight of her takes something out of him.  
  
She is a shape cut from the few images he has left, her confident shoulders and her lovely face, eyes dark like teak, her hair loose around her shoulders in swells of brown-black. The moon is ghastly and full tonight. Touched by its silver light as she is, he can believe that their people once possessed all the grace of Arlathan, and that their sorrow was enough to rend worlds in two. Her expression collapses, and the bloodied sword falls from her nerveless fingers.  
  
“Tamlen?”  
  
Yes, that is what they had called him. _Tamlen_. A name for a person—not a creature, not a rotting peon part of a greater, poisonous horde. A man. He wants to hate her for saying it, for reminding him of the enormity of what was torn from him, for bringing the awareness back. But he does not hate her, not truly, for he never did hate anything in life and doesn’t now, though the Song is full of loathing, alien and cold and slithering.  
  
“You…” His voice is cracked and dry, hoarse from being used only in agony. Words are clumsy, forming too-big in his awkward mouth. Does he know how to speak? “ _Lethallan_ …”  
  
Her breath catches and splinters in her throat. Her nightshirt is too big for her, splattered with blood that isn’t her own, and it warns him—he has to tell her. It isn’t safe.  
  
“Tamlen,” she says again, and he flinches.  
  
“Don’t—come near me,” he growls, hands fisting in the bedroll. “Stay away!”  
  
She still approaches when he scrambles back, upsetting all the covers around him. He cowers in a corner, raising his arms to cover his face and head—he is repulsive. Abhorrent. He can feel the evidence of it all around him, on him, inside him. The markings she wears, the beautiful ink, it was one of the first things he’d lost, as his skin had sloughed off, falling away, leaving behind darkened, hardened hide. Her hands are smooth in comparison, neat with oval nails and dextrous fingers: he had lost those, too, when they’d decayed and been pushed out by the claws, while his joints broke and elongated and stiffened.  
  
“It’s just me,” she assures, her voice thick with misery. Her fingers brush at his elbows as she crouches to his level. “Just me. Don’t be afraid.”  
  
“Don’t… look at me,” he says, resisting her, withdrawing further. The shame is burning him alive. “I am… _sick_.”  
  
“I don’t care.” She loosens his arms, resting her hands on his shoulders. “Let me help. Let me try…”  
  
“No!” he snaps, startling them both. He takes a deep breath, ragged. “No help—for me. Forget...”  
  
She is trembling. Her skin is cool against the roughness of his temple, against the fever that is blazing through him. She shakes her head, denying him. Tears streak down her cheeks. “I won’t. I would know you anywhere. Anywhere.”  
  
“The _Song_. In my head. It calls to me. _He_ sings to me.”  
  
His words torment her. He can see it in her posture, her wonderful, wonderful face, that isn’t a memory, that is unblemished. The dreams had tortured him with the idea of her suffering as he did, changing and shattering again and again until the fracturing of self was all that could be recalled and possessed. There is relief in knowing she is well, even if she can never go back. The music is around her, too, vile and cloying, the notes of its melody bonded to her. It makes him sad, but he can hear her through the drone of it all. She has not lost who she is.  
  
“I know,” she confesses. The tears come faster. “I know… I can hear it too.”  
  
It’s closing in on them, and he can’t draw breath into his ruined body. “I can’t stop it,” he says, looking for purchase somewhere—anywhere. His hands circle her throat, thumbs rubbing at the soft skin there, feeling her pulse skitter under his touch. Life. So fragile. So warm.  
  
“Tamlen,” she murmurs. The name strikes at him, a discordant wail spiking up through the river of sound.  
  
He forces it down, turning one hand so that the back of it skims against her jaw. He’s done this before, in another time, when he was hale and whole as she is, and they had been together. Her eyelids flutter, their lashes tickling his wrist.  
  
“Don’t want—to hurt you, lethallan,” he tells her. It is the truth, the one thing that hasn’t been altered—this inalienable reality of being, whether it is being Tamlen, or it is being a monster—he never desired her harm. And the Song is taking that from him, too. “Please—please… stop me.”  
  
She sags in his grasp, heart beating wildly. He watches her with milk-pale eyes, fascinated with the drag of her hair over his knuckles. It has been so long…  
  
“I’m so sorry,” she says, pressing his hand to her cheek. “I’m—” She stops short, tensing like a spring, but her speech is low and heavy with grief. “I wish we’d never found that cave.”  
  
He cannot weep. He hasn’t been able to for a while—but ah, would that he could, if only to alleviate the crushing in his chest. “Always… loved you.” He presses his forehead to hers, fingers digging into her neck. “I’m so sorry,” he gasps, a desolate reflection of her own apology.  
  
A sob finally escapes her. “I did, too,” she admits. “So much.”  
  
The music rises, drowning out everything—the cadence of her distress, the rush of the wind in the grass outside, his mind’s stunted protests, the slow hiss of the air he squeezes from her as his palm pushes at her throat—it’s all gone, and the drumming urgency of the Song takes over. _Take_. _Tear. Eat_. She will die, limp and weak, under him, and the muffled screaming in his head, that tiny, fading instinct that was cutting across the Song, telling him she is important, she is precious—it won’t be able to hold him back this time.  
  
She pulls at his wrists, reaches for her leggings. His claws leave lengthy, raking lines of red on her, and the Song demands more—more!  
  
He lurches at her, stopping to cough. Black sprays onto the pelts, her knees. He hadn’t felt the knife slide through his gullet. Pain is meaningless to someone who knows nothing else. He falls onto his back at her side, immediately feeling the fluid rise to leak past his lips. He can see the top of the tent, the poles holding it up, her face, framed by her hair, and the ghostly radiance of the moon through the canvas; there are no lights but what fires can give in the wild, and the mother of all stars shines brightest here, guiding anyone wise enough to look up.  
  
As he bleeds, silence returns to him. As he dies, his heart ceases to fear. He knows her, and without the veil of the Song obscuring her from his view, she is even more dear, even more secure—his beloved, brave and steadfast, and now all alone. He is leaving her here, in this world of darkness, full of horror and strange hymns.  
  
He could never bear her crying; she is better suited for laughter and kisses, and he can’t touch her, though his hands twitch with the effort of it. She bows over him, the gentle touch of her silken tresses grazing at his shoulders and cheeks, the tip of his nose. She holds him, despite the dirt, despite the grime, despite the fact that he’s been a corpse for a while before he ever began to physically expire. He shivers, turning his head into the crook of her arm, and chokes on the liquid in his mouth.  
  
He regrets that she’ll have to carry this burden as well, that she had to be the one to do it.  
  
Pieces of what was before drift back to him, gauzy and free of the Song’s usurpation. He looks on as she braids plaits into her hair by the side of a babbling brook, while she draws the string of a bow back, whisper-quiet, catches the maroon cast in her eyes when she glances at him over the top of a crackling flame, the form of her bare body under a quilt as she sleeps beside him. She is there in every picture. He is glad it was her.  
  
His lungs still.  
  
He remembers. A name for a person. A woman.  
  
_Lyna_.


End file.
